Sightwitch (The Witchlands 0.5)

Nadya waited in the cavern and watched me go. “May Sirmaya protect you,” she whispered.

Then my feet crossed the threshold, and I was sucked into a blizzard made of fire. A burst of such intense power that it both scalded and froze at once. It sucked the air from my lungs and flipped my stomach straight into my skull. I felt stretched. I felt crushed. I felt made of starlight and molten stone.

Then, in a blink, it was over. I was there. In the matching doorway Saria had carved on the cliffside above the Rook King’s palace.

At this high an altitude, there was no escaping the sun—nor its fierce glare upon the snow. Worse, my legs collapsed beneath me from the sudden sense of weight. Of existence. Of mountain cold to gust against me.

Footsteps crunched on the snow, and then a warm weight dropped over me. It smelled of tallow and wool. “These will protect your eyes,” came the Rook King’s low voice, and I felt his hands slide around my head.

A strap tightened, and tentatively I opened one eye. Horsehair goggles, I realized, and when I tipped up my chin, I saw that the Rook King wore a matching pair. With the hood of his black cloak towed up against the wind, the only part of his face that showed was a grin.

“You did it,” he said. “Well done.”

I nodded, a breathy laugh falling from my tongue as he helped me rise. “I did, didn’t I?” My words puffed with steam. “I built the door, Your Majesty, and here I am. I cannot believe it worked.”

“I can.” He offered me his arm and waved to a path cleared down the mountain’s snowy side. “Will you join me? As I said in my last message, the general wishes to discuss defense of the doorways with you.”

I nodded with far too much excitement. I had been ready for months to confer directly with the general, and I’d already told Nadya that it might be several hours before I returned.

“Let us go,” I declared, and I allowed the King to guide me into the evergreens. His rook, which I hadn’t noticed skulking in the trees, flapped over and settled on the King’s shoulder.

I still didn’t like that bird. It was far too human-like in its gaze.



We tromped past snowdrifts tucked behind stone walls, built just for that purpose, and we wove left and right around branches bowed low beneath the white. Not once did the wind stop its howl, and despite my added layer, I shivered and shook.

We had cold at the Convent, but this was a new level. Colder even than the deepest corners of Sirmaya’s underground.

I had visited this mountaintop fortress once before, but it had been late spring then. The snow had not lain thick across the crags and peaks, and the people had not been mounds of shapeless wool with only horsehair goggles to reveal them as human.

Each person we passed in the woods bobbed at the knees and tapped their fur-covered brows with a mittened hand. The Rook King always returned the gesture, an aura of absolute respect rolling off him.

Gone was the sense of outsider. Here, in his own realm, the Rook King felt as he had when I’d first met him: a man who wanted to stop the ceaseless death caused by Exalted Ones unchecked. A man who loved his home and his people.

Down, down we zigged and zagged toward his dark palace on the cliff. The wind carried the sound of soldiers and horses in training: the clash of metal, the jangle of tack, and hundreds of voices—women’s and men’s—shouting as they worked.

The Rook King’s army was the smallest of all the Paladins’, but no one doubted his was the fiercest. Trained in this harshest of lands, his soldiers were led not only by the King, but also by a general known across the Witchlands as the best of the best.

He was, aside from the Sightwitch Sisters, the only person on the continent who knew what the Six intended, and though it had irked me to go all these years without an introduction, I was too giddy over the door to care today.

We crossed a low drawbridge slatted over a moat filled with snow. Yet we did not pass through the main gate. Instead, we skirted the yard, using a corner tower to reach the battlements.

There, I had a view of the soldiers in practice—and what a sight to behold. I will never forget it. Two hundred people, bundled up and layered in loose, leather armor, moved in perfect coordination at the bellowed cries of a man on a wooden scaffolding. He paced back and forth, dressed no differently from his subordinates.

The general, I presumed.

Crossing the battlements, we entered a private study, where a welcome fire snapped in the fireplace. Steaming, rosemary-scented broth waited on a short table at the room’s center, and four cushions rested around it.

The King’s bird swept off his shoulder and landed on a hook overlooking a long, curved desk covered in maps and letters.

“This is the general’s office,” the King explained, yet before he could peel off his goggles, the door creaked open.

A fur-covered head poked in, and a decidedly feminine voice said, “Your Majesty, we need you at the stables, sir.”

Instantly, the rook was off his perch and flapping back onto the King’s shoulder. The sound of his flight drowned out whatever the woman said next—and whatever the King answered—yet the sudden stiffening of the King’s spine told me it could not be good.

“I’ll be right there,” he told the woman. Then he swung his gaze back to me. His expression was inscrutable behind the wool and fur. “I need to go to the stables. We’ve had disease hit my favorite hounds. Lady Saria just arrived to help, and … I apologize, Sister Eridysi. Can you speak with the general alone?”

I bowed my head. “Of course.”

“Thank you. I will join the two of you soon.” And with that, he yanked on his goggles and pushed back into the winter’s day.

The door thunked shut, and I was alone. After hanging my cloak and goggles on a knob by the door, I crossed to the fireplace to wait.

As I warmed up, a grin eased over my face. My head lolled back.

I had done it. I had done it! One passage was complete, and the remaining five would be easily done. Then, once we had them all, we could start porting people away from the Exalted Ones. Even the blade to kill them was almost complete too. All our plans were coming together.

I beamed so broadly my cheeks hurt. Even when the door rushed open and footsteps stomped inside, even as I turned to face whoever it might be, I still grinned.

I couldn’t help it.

The general stopped dead in his tracks at the sight of me, the door open and his mittened hand clutching the latch. Snow swooped in. Cold washed against me.

My smile faltered. Then frosted away entirely. Why did he stare? Why did he not shut the door?

I offered a polite bow. “I am Sister Eridysi. You must be the general.”

He flinched. Then, voice muffled by the angle and the layers, he mumbled, “Yes.”

Aiming for a string of hooks nearby, his back to me, he removed each layer. Hat, scarf, leather armor, outer coat, undercoat.

He shrank and shrank and shrank, until at last there was nothing but a man with dark hair and a standard black silk uniform.

Then he turned to face me.